[dondawest]

The title is extremely sensationalistic, Occam’s razor points to undetectable(by humans) scent trails that lead the ants to the same harvesting locations every year.

There are no revelations about memory or collective consciousness to be found in this article. Every Occam in the world would infer human-undetectable scent trails from the evidence presented here, not some cosmic revelation about “how memory works” like the title and first paragraphs of the article heavily imply.

@pg @dang this title and article in general is outrageously misleading.

[jhedwards]

This reminds me of some conversations I've been having with a friend of mine who is skeptical of "emergence" (or at least the way it is often described). After going over the problem with him for a while I eventually was convinced that emergence is not "more than" the sum of the parts, emergence is _precisely_ the sum of its parts.

Ants produce these higher level patterns not because there's some magical thing that "emerges", but because they are precisely evolved to coordinate with each other to create those patterns.